Misanthropic (9.7)

The Settlement Administrator has given claimants another extension. This morning, the official site states:

For claims where all claimants do not agree on the appropriate allocation for a work, claimants may submit additional information supporting their proposed allocation. The Settlement Administrator asks that claimants submit this information expeditiously and within 60 days of receiving access to the consolidated claim information. Please note that the 30-day period referenced in FAQ 26 (and referenced in the notices sent between September 2 and 4) has been extended to 60 days to permit Class Members more time to gather documents and attempt to resolve any disagreements. For the avoidance of doubt, this initial time period (originally 30 days and now 60 days) does not create a deadline by which all disagreements between co-claimants must be resolved. The dispute resolution process may, for some, take even longer than 60 days. Any works for which disputes are not resolved before the first distribution of Settlement payments will not be included in the first distribution and will instead be included in a subsequent distribution.

(It's about one scroll down on the site front page, on a regular laptop/desktop-sized monitor.)

This is sort of good news, but reconfirms some yuuuuuuuuuuge blindspots. In no particular order:

• The various forms of "disagreements" information provide no contact information for those with whom negotiation may be necessary, and very minimally identifies the basis for other claims. This is particularly problematic when there's been a claim made by a business entity that wasn't initially involved and the percentage claimed is stated as "default" — an author's IP holding entity, an anthology editor's estate, a publisher that was bought out… but none of those forseeably happened, right?
• There's no indication whatsoever of what constitutes appropriate "documentation" to submit. Consider an author's estate that has no contact with the agency, or worse that the agency has gone out of business (or is in active adverse litigation…), and the heirs otherwise have no clue where to look in the piles and piles of banker's boxers of papers for the formal reversion paperwork from a publisher that just claimed "default" on everything without checking its own records. Presuming, that is, that the reversion paperwork was ever formally done; especially in the early days of the century, there were more than a few instances of major commercial publishers of refusing to even respond to reversion demands based on the work going out of print. (Remember the "availability through POD keeps the work in print, even after we've remaindered all of the existing stock" nonsense?)
• There's no consideration of the problems with intestacy. I'm afraid that authors do die, all too often intestate. And sometimes sole-proprietor publishers have the same problems.
• The less said about checking/disclosing the status of publishers (or, for that matter, those IP holding entities) to "do business" because they're not in good standing, the better.
• Perhaps some acknowledgement of the "D" and "B" words ("divorce" and "bankruptcy"), and how those further complicate both communications and negotiations, might have been appropriate; I'm only aware of a metric buttload of such instances. And that presumes "finality" of any internal court/claims process…

There is, of course, a lot more.

These are obvious circumstances that should have been anticipated even long before the "parties" reached their settlement, but they didn't ask questions of those who might actually know something about the circumstances of authors who aren't presently appearing in The New Yorker (or never, like, coauthored anything). It's too early in the new academic year (another lacuna!) to assign grades, but this first draft is not encouraging, except in that reality has intruded yet again on the schedule of events.

Previously Calendared

It's that time of year again: All the quarterly and annual appointments piled up in a relatively short window. It's sort of like ripping the bandaid off instead of slowly and carefully peeling it off — hey, wait, there's another insurance form for that?

• In a rather short, sharp shock to the underlying meme of the fine arts — that "the original" is The Only Thing That Matters, meaning that to appreciate it or learn from it at all one must go to where it is to physically view it (with all of the subtle, and not so subtle, class/ethnic/nationality elements embedded in that journey), and that no copy ever allows for Appropriate Appreciation — the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has digitized its collection for free public access. The sideswipe at the memes of photography-licensing oligopoly, as distinct from the interests of actually engaging in original expression individual photographers, is also highly appropriate; particularly as that subculture is precisely the opposite of encouraging "Progress in the useful Arts."
• The contrast with the, well, dubious competence of the Anthropic claims process — in conception, design, and execution — is pretty obvious to those of us who've been inside the system for both creators and transferee-exploiters. On one hand, the lawyers involved were constrained by both lack of first-hand knowledge and the stated priorities of their clients; on the other, both general ethics and the specifics of class actions required more disinterested effort, in both conception and implementation, than is apparent… for fees on just the plaintiff's side exceeding the gross revenues of almost everyone involved.

  Which really, in the end, leads to the other half of "reform": Don't just criticize, but conceptualize and actually build something better that doesn't itself have large unintended consequences (at least not when predictable). That's the real problem with the "Information Wants to Be Free" movement (especially as exposed in "we refuse to pay anyone for data to train our large-language-model generative systems"): It doesn't — indeed, actively refuses to — engage with both the systemic and individual costs of information-creation mechanisms and environments.

  No, I'm not going to be specific until at least all of the briefs have been filed in the appeal. My concerns relate directly to the stated subjects of the appeals, and it would be inappropriate (not to mention would require taking the conduct of a few of the players outside for a spirited discussion and attitude adjustment assisted with a rhetorical 2x4). Suffice it to say that one of the nonparties has demonstrated that, at least until its entire leadership and senior staff changes, it can never satisfy Fed. R. Civ. Proc. 23(a)(4) due to its built-in blind spots (and borderline narcissism, but we are talking about the arts here…) — and that the concept of the "real party in interest" is also relevant to satisfying that part of the Rule.

• The rhetoric is building, and won't subside until well after 03 January 2027: Expect to hear more and more about "voter fraud" from ill-informed quarters (often with poorly-hidden conflicts of interest and narcissism well beyond anything found in the arts community). For a change, how about some validated data analyzed by, like, experienced nonpartisan interpreters of laboratory and other experimental data on the prevalence of voter fraud? Or, at least, voter fraud measured by its actual standards, and not "they didn't vote for me" (semipaywall).
• That last link sausage leads into contemplating both the ingredients and, perhaps more to the point, the cleanliness of the kitchen — and more likely the lack thereof. Direct election of anyone expected to exercise judgment within the bounds of a profession is incredibly stupid. We're at least smart enough not to do it for military officers (we don't directly elect unit commanders!); we shouldn't for health officials, judges, prosecutors (and Attorneys General), coroners, law-enforcement officials, etc. And especially for that last as to "sheriffs," who historically were not "cops" as we know them but armed tax-collectors and proxies for absentee liege lords (viz. the legendary Sheriff of Nottingham) who more often than not dealt only with writs and "major" crimes like stealing sheep, not driving a horse cart while intoxicated. In this context, direct electoral approval is worse than relying on (all-too-often evaded) professional regulation; the irony that the reason professional regulation often fails — twisted, conflicted concerns for "reputation of the profession" combined with a lingering internal sense of "there but for grace go I" — for the same reasons as "candidate reputation" must be acknowledged but shouldn't detain us for too long.

  But in present law, that remains (but shouldn't be) "constitutional" as consistent with "a Republican form of government." Something can be stupid without being overtly unconstitutional, though, and subjecting professional judgment in individual instances (often wound up with nonpublic information) to approval by direct election is at minimum stupid. We've got enough stupid in government (and any other "institution") without building its structure to elect more stupid.

Briefing for a Descent Into the News

Unfortunately, there's no Virgil handy to guide us out afterward, either. Contemporary satirists just aren't enough.

• If you need any further demonstration that Disbarred Rudy has gone bonkers, consider his screed urging the present mayor of New York City to not attend Friday's 25th anniversary eulogies for an atrocity. That screed underlines precisely why Mamdani should participate. It's not just because "he's a nonwhite Muslim," or anything else pointing at Mamdani himself as somehow an "inappropriate" mourner; it's because the attitude of taking action and spewing hate against those Not Just Like Me is precisely the attitude that informed the terrorists. They didn't go after a directly-related target, but a massively multiemployer office building… that employed more than a few members of their own religion, but were somehow lumped in as "Americans." So, too, for the first responders.^† This ironic turn on "We have met the Enemy, and he is us" is no doubt beyond Rudy's narrow-minded consideration.
• As a further demonstration of endemic inability to look outside the box, to judge canonical literature texts by their covers… or to look at context, in the same way that the curriculum itself has been forced to look at context. (Initial aside: Even in 1980, there were paperback editions available… I had to buy one each semester. They fit much better in backpacks than did the casebound editions.) The fundamental problem is that Bauerlein believes that the canon represented by sole focus in even a survey course represents either "literature" or "the study of literature." That's not to say that one cannot impose some structure on the field — only that one cannot do so by preliminarily restricting the data set to material likely to reaffirm entrenched doctrine.

  Somewhat more snarkily, a significant part of any movement away from canon by students (and younger instructors) came from increasing recognition that none of them could, or did, share a first name with Byron: Lord (really, state his "Christian name" without looking it up…). The context in which literature lived mattered more and more as more students from "less-privileged" backgrounds made their way into the better schools, convinced that they needed to be employable immediately after graduation so they could begin paying back student loans. Too, just off campus (even at elite schools) the unwashed kept getting closer, kept becoming more a part of students' lives. And meanwhile, some darned fine writing was coming up from civilization — the parts of the US west of the Hudson (and here, it's also important to remember that nineteenth-century-and-earlier Europe is east of the Hudson…), particularly in comparison to what was being newly published from the mid-1960s onward in the barbarian wilderness to the east.

  Put another way, one absolutely, positively must study the Michelson-Morley experiment and its context to understand modern physics — even the parts that aren't about subatomic particles or the speed of light in a vacuum as a speed limit. The real point is that the experimental results ended up proving that its experimental design was futile; that, more than anything else, is the problem with taking the editorial efforts of Professor Abrams et al. as reflecting not a, but the, foundation of literature and literary study. One might also contrast Beowulf, Chaucer, and dare I say Spenser with even the nascent novels of Sterne and Fielding — let alone Cervantes and the chansons de geste that were already evolving from verse as printing made memorization from oral presentation less essential — but that might be gilding the lily; and it's worth unpacking that metaphor to compare to Bauerlein's explanation, particularly in the midst of the field of orchids and Nepenthe in which students today find themselves. Or, perhaps, it's just some hungry sailor mistaking a priceless tulip bulb for an onion.

  All of which I say with a fondness for (many of the) classics — but, simultaneously, recognition that the classics constitute a corrupted data set, and that due to social and technological factors we simply do not have (and can probably never obtain) the rest of the data. That more lawyers (not excluding judges!) could do with the kind of "close reading skill" Bauerlein describes — one that necessarily asks about context beyond the document, such as why Ophelia should repair to a nunnery — is for another time.

• But that's a different-academic-perspective disagreement with Professor Bauerlein, not the kind of fundamental skepticism I have regarding a certain copyright-related settlement now in the throes of maladministration. The official administrator can't escape some responsibility here, but today I'm just shaking my head at the ignorance — not much of a surprise, but definitely dismaying. I have no idea which lawyers told the President of the Authors' Guild that "less than 25% of claims had any issues at all, and that in most cases the problems stem from typographical errors or other mistakes that can be easily fixed and don’t involve actual disagreements" reflected an acceptable claims administration process — particularly when there's no need to prove initial entitlement (like in a medical mass tort) or uncertainty regarding the facial identity of potential claimants after the settlement class was narrowed inconsistently with governing precedent. Those lawyers clearly had never been involved with significant class-action settlements of this nature, where there's an admission of the relevant conduct (however "excused" it was earlier claimed) regarding a purported closed universe of claims against a specified settlement fund.

  The Authors' Guild's track record in "representing authors" is — generously — abysmal. Ms Rasenberger has not helped matters here, perhaps aided and abetted by PW's own abysmal track record… But that's nothing compared to the noncredible explanation offered by a commercial publisher's CEO for the claim of 100% of payments by that publisher, and in that he's far from unique. The directions for filing claims were not a model of clarity, nor were other explanations offered clear and consistent, but I haven't run into an author yet who didn't understand that "If the publisher still had rights on the relevant date, I write '50%' for my claim because I have to assume the publisher will make its claim for 50% unless I've already been told otherwise" — even without consulting a lawyer. Another failure to engage in "close reading," I suppose.

• Which is still superior to the purported "objective test result" standard for Army cadet officers. Yes, this is tinged a little bit with interservice rivalry; that said, we should be expecting all officers to be substantially more capable than reflected in the fiftieth percentile of, well, darned near any widespread standardized exam issued below the graduate-school level. Indeed, one of the "practical lessons" of officership is that low standards lead to low achievement… and when it comes to making decisions involving the use of force, "the middle of everyone" is a low standard.
• Which is probably less frightening than AIs answer[ing] questions about the course reading for medical, nursing, and allied-health-profession students. The vendor's identity fills me with even less confidence than the probability that this will turn out well for anyone other than the vendor.

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†  It's just not worth going in to the broader bigotry that has followed 9/11. Followed, but (unfortunately) was merely amplified by — not caused by.

Questionable Freshness

Some of these sausages are based on recent items; some… are not. At least it's not the latest antisocial-media influencer fad, the Taco Bell Diet. Maybe we can get some of those TPUSA youngsters complaining about $20 burritos to try the less-expensive ones there; that would move their explosive diarrhea to the correct orifice, anyway.

• A college president with only a bachelor's degree in political science from a third-tier university fired an English instructor for continuing to teach a story with an unreliable narrator in her English class. At least it wasn't a "biographical study" of a fictional character (that in some more-fashionable literature departments slides toward psychoanalyzing the author) (yes, that's foreshadowing for a future blawg entry). In the current political environment — something allegedly close to that college president's academic knowledge — one would think it very important to understand unreliable narrators… unless the point is to prevent students from obtaining such expertise.

  It should surprise precisely no one that this took place at a state institution in Florida. Apparently, Florida Man is more sophisticated than Florida Educational Administrator.

• But at least they're reading, right? That first sausage was about only a short story, so maybe — just maybe — it was within the capability of those students to read. I'd argue instead that there are three other causes: The relentless demand for replicable metrics in the education system, which drives the measuring devices (papers and exams) toward the clearest, simplest, least-ambiguous, and as a consequence shortest material.^† Then there's the absolute load of self-congratulatory crap that makes its way past the cultural/commercial gatekeepers (gatekeepers are necessary to at least some extent — just not these gatekeepers). Lurking underneath, there's the question of whether the teachers can or do read book-length works themselves; we surely don't incentivize those in the classroom already to do so, let alone incentivize those who do so to spend time in the classroom.
• And then there's the uncontrolled spew of social media, which is harmful enough even before considering darker enabling behavior. That, in turn, becomes one of the ingredients in the first sausage on this platter, and not just because social media is a target-rich environment for finding unreliable narrators.
• The obvious linkage among the preceding sausages is that in many ways, they all involved unreliable narrators — often in multiple layers. It can become even darker when courts intentionally ignore attempts to make the narrative reliable. That, in the end, is what lower-court "factfinding" does: It first turns individual pieces of evidence — often of varying reliability, and virtually always incomplete — into "facts." Too often, though, those facts (and/or the evidence behind them) are subordinated to ideology. Eppur si muove, figlia di puttana — which is not about any particular judge (or at least not out loud!), but about theocratic mindsets: Not final due to infallibility, but treated as infallible because they're final.

  I suppose it could be worse. It could be memoirs and not court records. Tell me, how many lies are acceptable in a memoir? Perhaps a few more than in legal decisions that themselves did inadequate fact-checking (as to the long-prior proceeding described there)…

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†  This is not yet another veiled criticism of the bar exam, and especially not the multiple-choice multistate bar exam (for both substantive law and ethics). Or at least it's not veiled.

Misanthropic (9)

I thought it prudent after the last entry to refrain from further comment on Bartz until after all appeals were timely filed. Two were:

• Edelson, PC v. Anthropic PBC, No. 26–5391 (9th Cir., filed 18 Aug 2026) identifies its subject matter as:

  [F]rom the Judgment entered on July 20, 2026 (dkt. 680), including all prior orders encompassed in that decision. Edelson PC and O+Z intend to focus their appeal on issues related to the Order Granting in Part Motion for Attorneys’ Fees, Reimbursement of Expenses.

  ("O+Z" is another law firm "aggrieved" by the fees/expenses allocations.) This appeal has a full and active docket at the Ninth Circuit.

• Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP v. Anthropic PBC, No. 26–5455 (9th Cir., filed 19 Aug 2026) identifies its subject matter as:

  [F]rom the Judgment entered on July 20, 2026 (ECF No. 680), solely relating to the District Court’s Order Granting in Part Motion for Attorneys’ Fees (and incorporated prior orders, including ECF No. 515; the “Order”).

  This appeal does not have a full and active docket at the Ninth Circuit as of this writing, indicating that it may have been administratively consolidated with the Edelson appeal. Or not, it's still early and there's no formal notation. Update 29 Aug: The docket now treats this as an associated case with the Edelson appeal.

First, one preliminary matter: The statements of intent to limit the appeals to the attorneys' fees and reimbursements serve two purposes. First, they demonstrate standing to appeal — a law firm stating it has a greater claim on reimbursements and fees has standing to appeal. Second, it limits the amount of any prospective appeal bond, should one be required — not the whole $1.5 billion stated value of the settlement, but whatever portion of attorney's fees are at issue (at least an order of magnitude smaller). However, those statements voluntarily limiting the respective appeals' scope are nonbinding because the Notices each reference the Judgment.¹ That puts the whole thing in play, and certainly for amici.

So what happens next? The overworked clerks in the District Court's office have to prepare, and supply to the appellant(s), the "appeal transcript" — a certified and indexed copy of all "relevant proceedings" below. And because the Edelson appeal specifically includes "all prior orders encompassed in that decision" — which, because it relates to a settlement, includes the prior maneuvering regarding fair use — that's nontrivial, even in this day of electronic submissions on disk instead of boxes and boxes and boxes of paper. This is due by 01 October… and unlikely to be completed by then, if only because by law criminal matters have priority.

Then comes the part in which lawyers cannot be distinguished from vampires, because they're indoors in the library/their desks during all daylight hours and much of the night too: The briefing (even California lawyers look pale!). In the Ninth Circuit, the appellant's brief is due 40 days afterward, currently set for 10 November but frequently extended either on application (see Cir. R. 31-2) or because the appeal transcript was late. Amicus briefs supporting the appellant will be due seven days later, on 17 November. The response brief is due 30 days after the due date for the appellant's brief, currently set for 10 December (and frequently extended), and amicus briefs in support of the defendant (or of neither party… a nontrivial probability in this case) seven days later, currently 17 December. The appellant's reply brief, if any (yeah, these law firms will pass up an opportunity to put more words in front of the judges), is due 21 days after the due date for the response brief, currently 30 December.

And then things get really chaotic: Assignment to a panel, determination of a need for oral argument, scheduling of oral argument, and then the decision. Meanwhile, any motions regarding the amount of appeal bond, stay of the order/judgment being appealed from, etc. are also in play. Lots to do! More on this when the briefs — and motions! — are in; typically, in the Ninth Circuit this means that unless the appeal is either expedited or horribly defective the decision on the appeal itself will be in late 2027 or 2028. Decisions on motions — stay motions and expediting motions in particular — will be sooner.

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1. This is slightly misleading. A Judgment must be a separate document under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and there isn't one labelled "Judgment." The rules do, however, provide for appeals from nonfinal orders in some circumstances, and approval of a class settlement is sort of one and sort of the other (and appeals regarding classes Are Special anyway).

Diaper Patrol

There are babies involved in all of these link sausages, and really not in a cute way.

• Remember when actually talking about nepo-babies in H'wood was a thing? Nobody talks about them in publishing, but they're definitely there — on a slightly skewed axis, as the nepotism isn't all that often within publishing but mostly within the cultural-gatekeeper ecosystem. Both instances are not about actual skill or merit, as the subtext of the respective articles indicates (as to the MFAs, through silence); they are about virtue signaling, and in particular credentialism. And that doesn't lead to "elitist art" so much as "Arts but without Progress" — not a good thing at all, and my fondness for the m-dash predates the internet so there. Better to have a real education, as an immigrant, as a background for writing that actually creates Progress in the useful Arts… without appropriate virtue signaling or credentials.
• Slightly farther away, we need to worry about another thing babies say: "Mine!" And here, it's not the creators who are shrieking; it's the thieves, the imitators, the collectors. As to that last set, there's a very simple explanation: The entire LLM mindset (shared by most techbros) thinks only in terms of "ask forgiveness rather than get permission," whereas if there's one thing common across the arts it's thinking "get my permission before you do anything with My Stuff" — even when that permission is imposed by law in the form of fair use and fair dealing and the anxiety of influence, because the for-lack-of-a-better-term "reuser" needs to follow those permission rules. (Would that the author of that last link had been more assiduous himself in doing so over his career…)
• Contrariwise, there's the issue of how much should academics charge for access to their scholarly work, considering that unlike most creatives who put stuff out there academics aren't relying on income directly attributed to sale of copies of their works for lunch money. Although given pay scales, a latte may remain out of reach if they did…
• They wouldn't give her the Nobel or many of the other awards her work merited (despite her adjacency, anyway, to the right credentials), but at least Ursula K. Le Guin's house is now a historic landmark. Even with dragons and spaceships on the covers.
• Last for now, the big baby with his finger on the button and his hands in your wallet. He's certainly following in the tradition, although it's somewhat unfair of the letter-writers to cast blame solely on one source — Europe (and, in particular, British Petroleum and its sycophants in the British government spanning a century) and a couple millennia of negative selection-of-leaders sense (demonstrated ability to select the worst available leader and senior assistants) have surely soiled the playpen in advance. Meanwhile, other babies are squalling too, even as this one tries to deflect attention from his bad behavior with an entirely different temper tantrum from a second-generation "natural born citizen."

Below Minimal Professional Regard

Taking a break from misanthropy today. Well, not really, just from the Anthropic settlement; recent events and announcements have more than justified disdain for at least certain segments of humanity — especially when they're not just tolerating, but celebrating, hypocrisy.

• From the all-too-densely-populated Department of Ignorant Politicians and Wannabes, there's an unusually ignorant screed from some asshole Texan "protector" of "Our Republican Legacy" at The Hill claiming about all Democratic Socialists that:

  [A]ny political candidate who supports essentially canceling the first three Articles in the Constitution cannot truthfully say he or she will support and defend the Constitution. To take the oath would be to commit perjury.

  Two obvious rejoinders:

  1. So, those who supported Amendments XIII, XIV, XV, XVII, XX, and XXII perjured themselves whenever they took the oath, right? Because those amendments — separately and together — cancelled significant elements of Articles I and II, and impliedly cancelled a part of Article III. They're called Amendments for a reason, and they're specifically contemplated in Article V.
  2. This ignorant screed provides no evidence — not even any specific identification of offending provisions — that any element of the "Democratic Socialist" purported "platform" linked within it does anything more than advocate policy changes accomplished inside the rubric of Articles I-III. There's nothing there relating to "an entirely new governing system." Not even an overreaching assertion that the stated policies would impinge on states' rights (which Amendments XII, XIV, XV, and XVII certainly did!) matters in light of Article VI cl. 2.

  I've come to expect this sort of narrowness, of inability to read a document as a whole, from theologians, politicians, and other cranks (not to mention waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many lawyers). I invite Matthews to take his bloody Old Testament fundamentalism somewhere else… unless, that is, coming from archly Protestant Texas, he wants to emphasize the "Judeo-" part of "Judeo-Christian" and contend that later fundamental changes mandated by fundamental changes in conduct and nature of the population can never be discussed, let alone advocated. If that's his test, I'm happy to be an apostate. I've taken, reaffirmed, and exerted myself in support of that oath quite a few times; contrariwise, Matthews's semiofficial bio at the Federalist Society doesn't disclose that he has done any of that. <SARCASM> I therefore claim Greater Authority, all cynical misuse of methods of formal argument entirely intended and in parallel to those embedded in Matthews's screed.</SARCASM>

  The moment that "advocating for policy change" is equated with "disloyalty to basic values," we're back before HUAC and/or the Inquisition. How'd that turn out? Oh, wait, that both the subject screed and this response have reached our respective readers via electronic distribution has no dependence whatsoever on opposition to, and rejection of, theocratic statements of orthodoxy; there's nothing, after all, unorthodox as of 1947 about semiconductors.

• Speaking of bad lawyers and bad people, the technologically-challenged bar regulators in this state demonstrated that they couldn't supervise/test technology, or properly specify it, to enable the hazing ritual for pledges to Sigma Beta Alpha to go ahead. (And really: Yakima? In July? That's hazing in itself!)

  I call this a "hazing ritual" because the bar exam demonstrates precisely nothing about knowledge or fitness to practice law. At best, it's aimed at testing the ability to be a 1930s small-town "does everything" lawyer… and misses that mark badly. (Plus, you know, it's a century later and there are no more small-town "does everything" lawyers fresh out of law school.) The selection of subjects is at best inept, and more to the point not readily reducible to multiple-choice questions or short essays produced from sanitized fact patterns and not real clients. And at worst, both the questions and answer choices/expected "essay" answers are several years out of date, and insensitive to statutory and binding-precedent opinions that question so-called "black-letter law."

• When one must praise this particular US Attorney for the District of Columbia — however faintly, particularly given her track record (not just, but certainly considering, as a Faux News sock puppet) — for belatedly following the ethics rules that bind all attorneys, let alone those specific to prosecutors, and withdrawing prosecutions whose only basis is as a convenient cover-up (however implausible) for her current boss and lack any plausible factual support, things have gotten really bad. Which shouldn't surprise anyone these days. Of course, none of that is tested on the bar exam; no exam can test whether a lawyer will actually tell his/her/their client "You're in the wrong, and I won't facilitate misuse of the law to further that" — especially not when that client's temper tantrums would shame the average two-year-old.
• [AALA,] I regret that your submission does not meet authors' needs at this time. Best wishes with your future writings.

  In order to avoid a conflict of interest, it helps to be able to spell, punctuate, and define "conflict of interest," at least in an I-know-it-when-I-see-it fashion. On the evidence of its recent update to its so-called "Canons of Ethics" (ordinarily honored only in the breech/breach), the Association of American Literary Agents can't, or at least won't. The opening paragraph of its announcement demonstrates this all too well, both overtly and between the lines:

  The Canon was originally created in the twentieth century and was rooted in the practices of the publishing business of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, publishing, along with the overall media landscape, has undergone a dramatic transformation. We have seen publisher consolidation, the advent of entirely new publishing models, the rise of digital media, social media, mobile technology, the challenges of AI, et.al., as well as the loss of physical retail space and traditional review media. Author/creators increasingly operate across a wide range of platforms, services, and competencies. Demands on agents, from publishers and from our clients have changed as well, necessitating some big shifts in the role of the agent.

  Reading between the lines is sort of essential to evaluating manuscripts and placing them with appropriate publishers — the one job (thanks to possibly-unlawful "conscious parallelism" in commercial publishing) within the province of literary agents. In no particular order, note that this paragraph glides by its assumptions that (a) there was "the" publishing business of the twentieth century (and, worse, one that was well-served by the predecessor organization of the AALA… which, itself, arose because its predecessor had Legal Trouble resulting in its forced dissolution, even though it kept the same lawyer), (b) the "root" of those practices was in the then-contemporary late twentieth century and not earlier, from the 1950s to not later than the early 1970s, (c) the technologically-enabled explosion in the population of potential/actual authors has nothing to do with anything, (d) all worthwhile publishing efforts are at "book length" or its equivalent, (e) the AALA actually understands the changes referenced in "platforms, services, and competencies"… and, perhaps more to the point, has the humility to say "I don't know" at either the individual or trade-organization level for those parts it doesn't (in excess of 70%) and consult actual licensed professionals who do, then follow the advice given, (f) it actually enforces its Canons of Ethics… especially against members of the old boys/girls/whatever club, (g) its membership includes all legitimate agents, and the entrance requirements are meaningfully related to the rest of the Canons, and…. Oh, that's enough for now; on to the specific and fundamental problem with this revision:

  Having an "agent" clinging to that name due to its implication of "protector against abuse by third parties that have superior knowledge and bad or at least adverse-interest-based intentions" is useless when that "agent" becomes that third party. New canons 10–12 function together to make the agent the watchman of its own accounting and related issues, in particular for publishing and editorial services. I'm unaware of more than about 500 or so well-documented instances of what can happen in publishing — even in the "late twentieth century" — with even purportedly "old-line" agents/agencies, let alone the invitations for self-dealing to the outright scams^†. A writer would ordinarily expect his/her/their agent to scrupulously inspect a publisher's royalty statements for errors and worse; these new provisions make the agent responsible for scrutinizing its own royalty statements for errors and worse, similarly for every other outside service. (What, you really think that "ISP billing based on usage for the author's website" is free from problems?)

  The community of literary agents needs to accept that its competence is limited to connecting authors to commercial publishers (when appropriate for both, which does require some judgment) and acting as a mere conduit for business communications related to that. This attempt at rationalizing diversified one-stop shopping is an ill-considered mess that refuses to learn from the organization's own history — and doesn't include minimal requirements like "There must, at minimum, be separate business structures for non-agenting activities like publishing, like editing, and so on that at least formalize separation of interests." Even law and megaaccounting/business-consultancy firms do better than that!

  That these "new business lines" for agents are moving the AALA toward being a "publishing services job shop," and indeed actual publishers, is perhaps too obvious to discuss further. For the benefit of those who still believe that the only way to be published properly is through established commercial publishers, consider this the business end of a clue-by-four.

• Then there's greed and ego in H'wood. Like that's a surprise. It appears that a sequel to a blockbuster is unlikely to go forward now because a studio head thinks the proposed pay to the "talent" is too high. The implication that his feelings are hurt because the "mere employees" will get more than he does in his Very Important Job — and that he doesn't think his bosses (the Board of Directors) will bump up his salary sufficiently, which is just so insulting — is pretty clear… especially since the biggest likely "expense" for films of this nature is the advertising/promotional budget at the back end that's largely unnecessary (and indirectly flows back into that studio head's pockets via stock options, but that's for another time).

  I'd ask if that studio head, or indeed any studio head, had ever gone through a six-week-long shoot on location with twelve-hour days (plus extra time in makeup, wardrobe, etc.) while separated from family and friends, but I think I can guess the answer. And, perhaps most annoyingly, this studio head (and his counterparts) is putting a limiting value on a job he's incapable of doing himself at a time that "gross receipts" for films of this nature are increasing substantially greater than the rate of inflation… well, except for the occasional bomb, and most of those are predictable for other reasons and with rare exceptions in the long run break even with real-world accounting.

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†  disclosure: The author was a client.

Misanthropic (8)

The first question on the mind of Bartz claimants is going to be "When will I get paid?" In technical legal terms, It Depends.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, barrier would be an appeal. But who can appeal, and when? Even that is very much an "It Depends" sort of thing:

• The obvious deadline is that established in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure: Thirty days after judgment... but, too, the so-called "collateral order" doctrine may make some orders ripe for appeal, and the rule governing class actions makes the decision on class certification ripe for appeal. This is a hard deadline: Excusing a late appeal — especially in a class action — is rare and requires specific findings; "size of the matter" and "number of class members" and similar laments will be unavailing. Since this particular order was issued on 20 July 2026, the appeal deadline is Wednesday, 19 August 2026, at 2359 PDT (remember, July has 31 days).
• But absent a stay — which would require a separate motion — an appeal won't halt processing of the claims. Not all claims are going to be paid based just on the face of the claim. For some, there will be obvious fraud (a problem in all class actions), or questions raised with a legitimate response (also a problem in all class actions… and with well over 400,000 claims, some of them will be surprising). For others, there will be resolution of competing claims for the same work; most obviously, this will include multiple-publisher claims and publisher-versus-author disputes over whether the publisher actually had rights. On occasion, this will include author-versus-author claims, both formal coauthors and authors-as-partial-contributors (for example, Dangerous Visions, a multiply-reprinted 1967 anthology that is in the canonical list of works infringed, has at least 37 claimants to the author's portion of the settlement… and the publisher's portion is, to say the least, "subject to disagreement").
• Under US jurisprudence, an appeal can be filed by an "aggrieved party"… and that includes winning plaintiffs dissatisfied with with the amount, timing, or anything else of forthcoming relief, including absent class members (that is, claimants who weren't designated as class representatives). There are, of course, procedural hoops to jump through. Here's the area that gives the most latitude for appeal in Judge Martínez-Olguín's final approval order:

  Third, a number of objections take issue with the requirement that any book listed on the Works List must possess a copyright registration number (registered within a certain timeframe, as set out in the Class definition) as well as an ISBN or ASIN for certainty regarding the eligible and included works. These Objections are overruled: “The class certification order recognized that the related limitations let all class works use registrations as evidence of certain facts and pursue statutory damages.” Bartz, 2025 WL 2961371, at *1-2. “The class is limited to books for which an ISBN or ASIN exists. From the metadata[,]… as well as through commercial metadata associated with ISBNs or ASINs, copyright registrations associated with these works can be identified. For every certificate of registration presented by named plaintiffs, for example, there is an associated ISBN (e.g., Br. Exh. 30). And, because the classes are limited to works registered within five years of first publication, these certificates and the facts therein are presumed valid.” Bartz, 791 F. Supp. 3d at 1059.

  Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. [20]24-5417 (N.D. Cal.) Dkt. 0680 (20 Jul 2026), slip op. at 10 (emphasis added, typography corrected, footnotes omitted). Consideration of precisely why this narrowing of the "well-pled" (term of art) class allegations — see Bartz Dkt. 0070 (First Amended Complaint, 04 Dec 2024) at ¶¶ 63–71 — is fair to the non-named-plaintiff members of the class as defined in the complaint has received little or no attention. Consider, for the moment, a published-in-Canada work, republished in the US, for which the US publisher failed to obtain a copyright registration within five years after publication but is required under the Berne Convention to be fully protected. Then there's the Muchnick declaration by the Supreme Court that a registration is not a prerequisite to settling on behalf of other than registered works, so long as the named plaintiffs' works are registered. The issue here is not that the negotiation process leading to such narrowing is inherently improper, but that this opinion does not disclose the judge's reasoned basis for exercising her discretion and thereby opens matters up for an appeal (especially given certain intraclass conflicts blithely ignored by just about everyone). This is far from exhaustive, too; consider the inaccuracies in stated work identification in the accepted database (exceeding 2% in my sample… that is, somewhere around 10,000 potential claims), incorrect identification of claimants, and so on. In short, this is ripe with potential at minimum bases for appeal just on the class definition.

• And then… there's the jurisprudential error. The Final Approval order blithely concludes that "any putative Objection filed by a non-class member is stricken because non-class members lack standing to object to the settlement" (slip op. at 7), citing to an unpublished opinion in the same district that in turn… "overreaches" is the nicest thing I can say about it. There is a substantial difference between lacking standing and lacking merit — and in this particular instance (but not quite as much in the cases underlying the authority relied upon!), some excluded parties fall within the Amended Complaint's class definition but not that of the settlement.¹ There may be meritorious reasons for later narrowing… but those excluded by that narrowing do have standing to object. Consider a hypothetical class action, pled in broad terms, against a pharmaceutical firm that is later settled on behalf only of a narrower class consisting of white female class members; Hispanic men who otherwise fall within the pleaded class definition certainly have standing to object to being cut out. Returning to Bartz, this particular error does affect a wide variety of considerations of "fairness" to the settlement, precisely because Judge Martínez-Olguín did not consider such objections on their merits so as to exercise her discretion in a reasoned matter. (That it's an error with momentum of custom does not make it correct, guys.)

This, of course, is just an outline. It should be sufficient to demonstrate that a party that actually has standing to object — and every class member named or otherwise identified in the Final Approval has at least standing — is in a position to file an appeal that will result in every guilty/liable defendant's preferred remedy: Delay. None of this is to say that no payments whatsoever will be made on or about 17 September 2026, only that it's dubious as to their scope or anything else. Authors: Don't budget an expected September payment toward your 01 October mortgage/rent payment. Publishers: Don't expect to make otherwise-due royalty (or staff salary — I'm lookin' at you, [redacted]) payments out of it, either.

---

1. The reasoning behind tolling of statutes of limitations for absent class members expressed in American Pipe & Constr. Co. v. Utah, 414 US 538, 554 (1974), rather compels this. Details and explanation, however, are beyond the scope of reasonable blawgs, let alone reasonable people.

Misanthropic (7.5)

Before diving in to any of the details regarding the actual meaning of "final approval" of the Settlement on 20 July, it's fairly important to revisit a couple of context items.

First, and perhaps most important, one must remember that any settlement is a least-worst-outcome compromise. By definition, a difficult-to-value harm has already occurred, and reducing that to certainty — a number of dollars, a clear promise to do/not do something in the future, compensating all of the professionals who facilitated reaching the settlement — is by its very nature an ephemeral agreement that outsiders can find fault with. The very existence of statutory damages in copyright actions (presuming a number of prerequisites have been met) represents recognition that a hypothetical infringer's accounting might not be sufficiently clear to determine "lost profits," let alone any other aspect of "valuing" a particular copyright infringement claim in the moment. Now multiply, or even exponentiate, that by multiple parties, let alone class actions, and one can reach a pretty clear conclusion: No matter what or how a copyright-infringement claim is resolved, via settlement all the way through trial, outsiders can always criticize it as either inadequate or excessive (sometimes both simultaneously!), and even the parties will remain dissatisfied. If there's one aspect of conflict resolution to which the aphorism "It's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission" does not apply, it's "control of individual expression."¹ "Because it would be kewl" doesn't transfer well when an author's mortgage payment is on the line… or, more to the point, the author's ability to pay a professional or agent to review a prospective authorized use of their material in advance of making that blockbuster.

Second, and somewhat less abstractly, one needs to remember that just as the map is not the territory, a settlement — and especially a class-action settlement — does not define the interests of the parties at the outset. Instead, those interests relate to what is recognized and explicated by the parties. In this context, consider whose interests actually control (and that is a relatively simple example, because that author didn't work with a lot of coauthors), and it's incredibly easy to imagine that changing even between the infringement and the expiration of the statute of limitations. Authors are mortal, too… and their heirs and executors usually ill-qualified to judge or serve the interests of either the author or the ouevre. The interests of the individual authors — and other copyright holders — are at most an intersection, let alone a union or congruence, even before considering temporal-change issues. This should, but never does, mean that one should not map "interests served by a class settlement" onto "interests of an individual copyright holder… or infringer," let alone onto "Progress of… useful Arts" related to a specific instance of infringement of a specific work.²

Third, and last for the moment, any judicial remedy reflects the compromise of not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good (or good enough, or satisfactory, or less-bad-than-the-alternatives) when it applies to organizational conduct. The Bartz v. Anthropic matter makes it even murkier because there are multiple organizations, both formal and de facto, on both sides of the v.… including objectively "bad actors" on both sides. Consider, for the moment, a hypothetical supervisor (if that's not an overstatement of power/influence/responsibility) at Anthropic whose only role was to recommend against using this convenient database of material as a training corpus, but who was ignored/overruled, and how that supervisor's reality interacts with this settlement.³ What is having "Anthropic" on one's work history with a job title indicating this going to do in five years when applying for a job at Disney?

Put together, the real point here is "don't overgeneralize" — a generalization that is not itself reflexively too broad.

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1. Techbros generally haven't figured this out yet, because they conflate "identical means of storage and manipulation of information" with "the means of storage and manipulation of information determines the nature of the information." Those who have figured it out warp and/or deny it due to lack of relevant context and conflicts of interest. Consider, for example, the "context" that would be applied by someone whose only experience is abstract manipulation of a large dataset (Newtonian mechanics) to both the expression "That which we call a rose | By any other name would smell as sweet" and its connotations in context and generally (quantum mechanics regarding a single molecule, let alone its constituent parts… or presence and function in a cellular organelle).

   More to the point, as a group techbros have a semiinstitutionalized tendency to overgeneralization, epitomized by shrieking of "Information wants to be free!" at communication by metaphor merely because the literal bounds of the metaphor can be recorded… and imputing motivation and conduct of some prominent bad-actor owners of copyright interests to all of copyright. CP Snow was far too optimistic when he divided knowledge-communities only binarially — there's a lot of fuzziness, and it comes from more than two sources.

2. Put another way, the interests of whoever-owns-Simon-&-Schuster-today are not the same as those who wrote Star Trek™ novels, and contributed to Star Trek™ collections and nonfictional works, that appear in the data set of the Bartz matter. And there are more than a few.
3. As foreshadowing of an issue that I will discuss down the road — I'm not even going to identify the potential conflict because that would give it away and activate the conflict — consider the publisher's claim in the Bartz matter based on a contractual agreement where the relevant contractual clause was itself unlawful, however customary and however "agreed to" by the actual author(s). Consider this the creepy music playing just before the teenagers agree to spend a night in the old haunted house down the road, notwithstanding their later choices (and that's an unduly optimistic view concerning authors!). Foreshadowing: Your mark of quality literature.

Established Sausage Platter

Burn sinners at the stake! OK, maybe not such a good idea.

• Next time, read your own bloody book before "peace negotiations" start. Better yet, don't go to war — excuse me, "exert irresistible 'murikan military prowess in pursuit of critical national objectives (not a 'war,' never that)" — without defining the bloody "critical national objectives" and determining whether military force can or will achieve them. As a veteran, I'm carefully avoiding consideration of whether what we've got is irresistible.

  It would obviously be expecting far too much to contemplate preconflict ethical rationales (and post hoc rationalizations/evasions). Or cost/benefit considerations. Or that cartoon. Or any visit to Dover AFB.

• This sausage is made from special cuts from S. zuckerbeast. That a swine is at issue is well demonstrated by legal adventures in the UK and right down the road demonstrating that it's special. Which just anticipates cannibalism among teh piggies.
• At that, another dubious information leech has its own legal difficulties regarding criticism, and this in a nation with no First Amendment.
• Turning from BigTech to BigMedia provides little — if any — relief from the assholery. (Surprised much?) Whether we're talking mergers well within the preexisting scrutiny guidelines for any market definition that isn't artificially expanded or unshared windfalls (that were themselves ineptly handled) — and not at all limited to electronic media — the distributors (and their owners) are obviously entitled to all benefits of freelancers' creativity. And I mean all benefits (this shouldn't be an issue!). Some rights, associations, and rights to exclude interlopers are more equal than others.

  But at least BigMedia isn't FIFA.

• It doesn't have to be mass entertainment, either. As to one recent controversy that remains problematic even after a partial retreat, there's really only one, Taylor-Swiftian description for anyone who knows the conglomerate (and its past conduct) very well: Elsevier gonna Elsevier. This was predictable almost a decade back when Elsevier bought SSRN, and I strongly suspect that it would have happened five years ago but for COVID. Enhanced branding, coming up… notwithstanding one of the ingredients in the preceding sausage (or the intellectual dishonesty of exploiting distributor branding for in draft academic work).
• All of that, however, is the enemy without. The enemy within will remain more dangerous until we get our eighteenth-century concepts of how to elect in the first place into even the mid-twentieth century. Which will not be happening any time soon, if only because it would undermine the individual power-bases of the self-selected political gatekeepers — the unelected ones who determine what's on the ballot in the first place.

Meanwhile, I'm having to watch today's US-Australia match in Spanish, on Telemundo, thanks to the typical neglect of the local Fox station. About 20% of the city has difficulty just in time for major live events (including sport) with the broadcast signal; curiously, it's never a problem for ad-laden local news and/or infomercials, or for any other broadcast group. Hmm, when is their FCC license up for renewal…

An Unnatural Mixture

Beware the ingredient labels! Not just the sausages, but the news…

• Since no one really knows what an emolument is anyway, I suppose it's just fine for the entire House of Orange evade IRS scrutiny. At least until some judge or another takes a closer look, and another judge limits branding opportunities, and still other judges determine that he has to pay damages assessed a couple years ago. But at least it isn't more weaponized identity politics, right? Right?
• So the Orange One is demanding that applicants for Green Cards return to their home countries to do so, eh? Well, I nominate some prominent naturalized US citizens for similar (retroactive) treatment, especially those from shithole countries. <SARCASM> If you're going to impose the original intent on immigrants, you just can't allow people to take advantage of loopholes, right? Correcting mistaken noncompliance with that original intent by half a century of prior Administrations is the least that can be done!</SARCASM>
• I've long thought that career politicians were cockroaches, scuttling away from light, spreading dirt and disease, able to survive a nuclear strike… here's proof. And mislabelling "political operative" as "public service" among those who never gave actual national service (let alone dodged the draft when it was in force) gives mislabelling a bad name, even for that reservoir of lower-value human capital.
• That, however, seems positively productive compared to providers of writing advice who don't advocate, first and foremost, "read more, you ignorant gits!" Consider the cognitive dissonance that this is merely a book review appearing in a now-disreputable source that actually doesn't want anything truly creative (and hasn't for four decades) — just a fresh coat of paint on little (quasiliterary) boxes (so long as they're somehow about Manhattan rather than Daly City — and the less said about the true problems with "plaster versus sheetrock" the better… particularly as I've both lived in Daly City and repaired plaster walls).

  Here's a hint to the writing-advice subindustry: Maybe — just maybe — y'all can learn something from the scientific method, in which one looks at data first and theorizes afterward, then tries to confirm the theories with more data. That's how one avoids bullshit like asserting that all stories fit within a limited number of (mislabelled) "plots" , simultaneously ignoring substantial material and silently redefining terms. I realize that may undermine your there's-a-secret-method-for-success-that-only-I-can-explain model, but then I've spent virtually my entire life opposing that bullshit in various contexts. Like this one:

• All of which makes much more sense than relying on USNA graduates to explain military strategy and theory. To identify just a couple of fundamental errors in that article (by the guy who popularized "shock and awe" as a way of life — something that doesn't work against the desperate and the ideologically driven):
  • The British and French did not have "superiority in the quality of and quantity of weapons" during France '40. For one thing, their individual tanks lacked the radios found in virtually every German tank — and rapid, across-battlefield communications are just a little bit important in both quality and quantity of effectively employable motorized weapons platforms. And in the air, the quality/quantity disparity was far, far worse (especially as to the French, and most especially of all as to training and logistical support).
  • The Japanese didn't actually care about making the US "capitulate" prior to Pearl Harbor; they only wanted to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and actually preferred nonmilitary means of expansion of influence rather than outright occupation/conquest/"victory" (for values of "victory" requiring acceptance of non-Western conceptions thereof). Yamamoto's writings explicitly denied that anything more than a temporary vacuum, rather than a capitulation, was either necessary or possible.
  • Neither North Vietnam nor the Afghan Taliban were "militarily naked compared to the US and its allies" in their own territories. Abstract measures of the "theoretical balance of forces" without regard to where, when, and how long they will be engaged, let alone for what purpose, have less validity than IQ scores… as demonstrated by the first War of American Secession two and a half centuries ago (c. 1774–81).
  • Ullman's never-explicit (but all too convenient) redefinition of "asymmetric and hybrid tactics" focuses, or tries to, on "the battlefield" rather than the Clausewitzian "what legitimate political objectives can be either advanced or impaired by the organized application of violence." As to the two contemporary conflicts he dances around — Russia-Ukraine and US/Israel-Iran — he never engages with the fundamental asymmetry: The objectives of the various parties. That's the bedrock of "decisive strategic thinking" — understanding and thinking about not just one's own objectives, but one's opponents.' Conversely, the implicitly-redefined "asymmetry" the he does consider never engages with either unconventional forces (the more-traditional context of "asymmetric warfare") or the distinction between force presence and force projection. On the other hand, this is precisely the kind of blindness (and rhetorical shiftiness) that I long ago learned to expect from the Atlantic Council.

  And that's before considering their too-common impulses to prefer immediate policy preferences to the rule of law and the Constitution they swore to support and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This BS is not quite as credible as appropriating someone else's comic-book characters as branding for one's weaponry — and less likely to enable conquering the Roman Empire.

In Search of an Alternate Soundtrack

Not just to the news, either.

• Definitive evidence that the Arabian Gulf aggression is nothing but a dick move…
• The increasingly irrational statements from the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seem to be encouraging Democratic Party leadership to advocate for the 25th Amendment. (Unfortunately, there's no equivalent to deal with the party leadership, much of which displays similar evidence of "cognitive challenges.")

  The problem here is that they're not looking at the calendar, not reckoning with the egos on the other side of the aisle. Any grousing about actually invoking § 4 — nonvoluntary removal due to inability "to discharge the powers and duties of his office," upon a certification of the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet — needs also to consider the 22d Amendment, § 1. No matter how obvious such "inability" is, the egos (at minimum verging on narcissism) involved among the Heffalump leadership will desperately seek to avoid doing anything prior to 22 January 2027, because a removal on or after that date would allow Vice President Vance, upon assuming the Presidency, to appear twice more on the electoral ballot. And these nutjobs don't believe they'll ever lose another election, if only because in the words of an astute British political operative: "[F]irstly, we shall fight this campaign on issues, not personalities. Secondly, we shall be the only fresh thing on the menu. And thirdly, of course, we’ll cheat," if only by creating more rotten boroughs — even if Colin the dachshund is a yellow-dog Democrat, he wouldn't be able to vote. So by waiting until one full day less than two years remains in the current term, they get to reelect Baldrick Vance twice.

• Of course, we really don't want to hurt the delicate feelings of the self-appointed overclass, either. The irony of a "real estate" titan complaining that things are "like" racism, given the real-estate industry's history of redlining (overtly and otherwise), is more than a bit much. So, too, is Ken Griffin complaining that anyone else's policy proposals are "creepy and weird."
• I suppose it beats nepo babies in "serious publishing" as a reason for frothing at the mouth. It's not like the self-appointed overclass has nepo babies of its own, right? It's almost like inheritance of "titles of nobility" aren't prohibited, but encouraged, in the Constitution. (And I didn't even have to reference Chicago politics…)

Always Greener

We know what's on the other side of the fence, given both the date and the policy decisions in DC, right? Or at least one might, rather forlornly, hope that those policy decisions are being driven more by overindulgence in mild hallucinogens and intoxicants than by, say, fundamental character defects — not excluding those sniping. Maybe we just disagree on definitions:

• I am still refraining from much comment concerning the merits — practically and theoretically — of the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit. The publicly-accessible reason is that I have conflicts that make most such public statements inappropriate, at least prior to the fairness hearing next month. The less-publicly-accessible reasons, however, are quite a bit more theoretical with distressing practical hooks. One of those underlies a recent parallel action, in which the proprietors of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series have sued separately — and it has taken me a month to make this comment marginally civil.

  The CSS parallel lawsuit exposes two critical, self-defeating, and self-aggrandizing problems with the way American copyright law has developed. That exposure, however, is in the end less about copyright law itself than about who makes it — and who doesn't. American copyright law as it has developed has made the proprietors of CSS copyright claimants with standing to sue, because the misbegotten work-made-for-hire doctrine makes them the owners of the compilations at issue… and abusive (but nonetheless so common as to be default) contracts have made them the owners of the individual-piece copyrights. Or, at least, owners under judicial and Congressional decisions reifying their colonial-master interests notwithstanding the Constitutional definition of the protected parties (which the remainder of that commentary elides — at best).

  In a truly just world, both sides would lose, and all relief would be granted to other victims for the various misconduct. But as they'd have to lose to parties not before the court — those "indigenous peoples" who weren't at the table, both the authors and the public — this is nowhere near a just world. The irony of inserting "justice" (and "ethics") into these musings given the prior conduct of the particular parties is too much for a wartime-in-all-but-name Monday morning. Not to mention that this is the civil version…

• At least in the copyright arena, the conflicts of interest are about 0.5 removes from the underlying subject matter. Not so much with business disparagement, in which the conflict of interest all too often is the actual subject.
• Then there's the complete mislabelling of what's actually going on in the author-turns-down-prize brouhaha. The mislabelling begins with the word "prize": It's not a "prize," but a "paid celebrity endorsement opportunity." And viewed in that light, Ms DeWitt's rejection of the "opportunity" is far more understandable. For all the abuse, at least actors are being paid for and are directly connected to their products on film tours… author tours in support of outside-sponsored "book" or "writing" awards, not so much. (And we're just not going to go into the opportunities for dubious conduct on tours, either.)
• Despite my lack of academic credentials in the discipline, I must profoundly disagree with Professor Larsen's assertion that there's no such thing as a "psychopath". It's perhaps possible to view his position as saying that the term is misdefined, at least in the public imagination; or that what is general known as a "psychopath" should instead be termed "sociopath not amenable to internalization of adverse social-personal consequences," a description both infelicitous and incomplete. It's also perhaps possible that the disagreement arises from experiential and professional interfaces that differ between encountering those who categorically disregard adverse impacts on third parties in pursuit of their own interests and those who relish those adverse impacts on third parties as demonstrating their own worth. "Disregarding the bad and collateral" is fundamentally different from "aspiring to supervillainy." Now I'm not accusing any particular individuals in world governments (now or in the past) of that latter — oh, wait, yes I am…
• The most obvious response to losing the war on poverty is a war on fraud, right? Probably only if one has been overindulging in the allegedly mild hallucinogen that's this date's subject after attempted eradication in another failed war.

Misanthropic (7)

In an order issued this morning that should surprise no one at all (see Dkt. 579 (26 Jan 2026), stating that it would be reset), Judge Martinez-Olguin has cancelled the previously-scheduled hearing for 23 April and reset it to 14 May (see Dkt 632 (08 Apr 2026)). The order setting the new hearing date:

1. Resolves some other pending procedural foofery regarding an objection filed by a non-class-member (which I have not reviewed, but — in the nature of these things — probably asserts, at least in part, that it was improper to exclude the objector from the class definition);
2. Sets both the approval hearing (also referred to as the "fairness hearing" — a term I prefer because it's quite rare for approval to be granted at the hearing, and under changes in law since 2003 may no longer be appropriate in any event) and the hearing on attorney's fees for 14 May 2026 at 1400PDT, with instructions for passive listening via Zoom (see Order at 2);
3. And, somewhat between the lines, indicates some judicial discomfort with some of the representations blithely being made by various counsel and parties, without specific criticisms. This is both entirely natural and previously signposted: Judge Martinez-Olguin appears to be taking seriously her duty as a gatekeeper for the public interest regarding a settlement pushed onto her docket three months ago in contexts generally foreign to judicial experience.

Aside: The reset hearing date makes certain that payments will not be in classmembers' hands in August 2026. So there.

March Madness

…it's a break from Everyday Madness in DC, where right now the #1 seed is in trouble against #16. But March Madness is supposed to be about entertainment, thus this platter's selections.¹

• Exploitations of copyrighted materials — and the right to make derivatives works from existing copyrighted works, depending on the (very difficult and not amenable to predictions embedded in statutes) directness of derivation — are definitely in the news. The tide seems to be shifting against generative-language-model-system claims of fair use. This has ranged from government climbdowns to appellate skepticism (at oral argument at least), perhaps best epitomized by attempts to reverse-engineer writing styles and then monetize that without the originators' permission (but using their marks in commerce).

  The fundamental problem — just like everywhere else in "copyright law" — is that far, far too much argument neglects the distinction between "expression" and "factual content." Consider an LLM ingestion of the following passage:

  The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!
  Down the hill, down the hill, thousands of Russians,
  Thousands of horsemen, drew to the valley — and stay’d;
  For Scarlett and Scarlett’s three hundred were riding by
  When the points of the Russian lances arose in the sky;
  And he call’d, “Left wheel into line!” and they wheel’d and obey’d.
  Then he look’d at the host that had halted he knew not why,
  And he turn’d half round, and he bade his trumpeter sound
  To the charge, and he rode on ahead, as he waved his blade
  To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die —
  “Follow,” and up the hill, up the hill, up the hill,
  Follow’d the Heavy Brigade.²

  Using this to train an LLM that the Heavy Brigade was commanded by Scarlett, consisted of approximately 300 cavalrymen, and charged thousands of Russian soldiers after wheeling left into a line upon a trumpeter's (probably off-key!) sound — without regard to the credibility of the source, of alternate purposes, of the Agincourt Problem³ — would be fair use, because even if inaccurate that's not expression, but fact. "To the gallant three hundred whose glory will never die," however, is not only analytic — it's probably not a nonobvious-enough insight to be more than mere fact — but expressive. And another generative-LLM-system response that tries to echo that is echoing expression, not fact, and thus not nearly so clear a "fair use" as LLM proponents would have us believe.

• In a related area of concern, who has the copyright in generative-LLM-system outputs? Is it the system itself? The US Copyright Office doesn't think so, and the Supreme Court refused to review. What this neglects, however, is the distinction between "copyright ownership" (which is property) and "authorship" (which is anything but clear).⁴ Copyright ownership can exist only in a recognized juridical person that can own things… implying that before a specific generative-LLM-system can own a copyright, it has to be aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive (or at least recognized as an entity with the right to sue and be sued). Science-fictional consideration of whether Thaler was, therefore, implicitly violating the Thirteenth Amendment by enslaving a "person" is probably just, well, madness.
• Authors probably can benefit from day jobs. Of some sort, anyway; sure, a writing-related job, or even a subject-matter related job, is an obvious potential benefit (although I draw the line at being a criminal as appropriate, intentional preparation for writing about crime). Maybe being a sporadically-employed longshoreman would be enough, though.

  The real reason for having a "day job" is exposure to Other Stuff. People write what they know or is within the bounds of their existing imaginations, and there's little argument that a workplace is a good place to encounter elements to inspire imaginations ranging from speech patterns and rhythms to personality quirks to actual, ya know, ideas.

• At the opposite (financial) end of things, consider ownership of big-business sport franchises — especially those that "sell" for billions of dollars. My biggest objection is that the NFL appears to be avoiding its own Rooney Rule among those who are charged with complying with it. My second-biggest objection is that the Raiders epitomize the problems with inherited ownership interests. Epitomize, albeit with with lots of company, even and maybe especially within its own league.

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1. Noncompliance with prevailing labor and independent contractor compensation requirements guaranteed.
2. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Heavy Brigade [at Balaclava, October 25, 1854] (1854) (typography altered to US custom)
3. In accounts of military events, there is a strong predisposition to enhance the heroism of the side favored by the chronicler via inflating (or, occasionally, neglecting) any imbalances between the forces. At Agincourt, for example, most accounts not written by French observers and, later, historians estimate the size of the French army at over 20,000… neglecting that even at close intervals, the three waves agreed upon could not have fit more than 12-13,000 soldiers onto that battlefield without forcing their flanks into the woods on either side… which would have negated the dismounted tactics of the English archers later on. A bigger-than-reality French army suited those emphasizing English valor, from Shakespeare to every public-schoolboy essay. There are similar obvious problems with Tennyson's account; for one, "thousands" of Russians deploying lances (not pikes) raises one's eyebrows given the terrain around Balaclava, especially with the implication that only the Heavy Brigade was deployed against that opposing force. A generative LLM-based system's general inability to discern these kinds of issues is another flaw that gets substantially less attention than it should.
4. The biggest hint that "authorship" is not a pure property interest is that the Copyright Office will allow a petition to correct "authorship" by any "interested party," but copyright infringement suits can be filed only by the owner of an infringed exclusive right. (It's even more confusing in most of the rest of the world where droit moral is integrated into copyright law.) And this matters — a lot — to standing to sue in US courts, which is founded largely on one of two things: Injury to a property right or violation of a statutory right for which explicit right to sue has been granted. (That I believe this a too-stringent conception doesn't change the law as it exists; neither does techbro belief that copyright is an inconvenient barrier to their weltanschauung.) The irony that a more-penetrating linguistic analysis would tend to expose this morass when we're talking about something trained via linguistic constructs — even when purportedly trained on visual depictions — is for another time.